


Symphony in Red

by closetcellist



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Gen, Pre-First Appearance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 16:33:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetcellist/pseuds/closetcellist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at Grell Sutcliff before his first appearance. Like Wilde, he lived in the time of Aestheticism and Decadence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Symphony in Red

Madame Red was an avid reader of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and was especially fond of that charming upstart Oscar Wilde’s articles.  Oscar, or ‘O’ as he hoped he might one day be famous enough to be known, had a lot to say about everything, and, though she rarely agreed with it, Madame Red found the extraordinary and occasionally shocking reviews amusing enough to keep old copies of the _Gazette_ that housed articles she found inspiring.  It was while attempting to organize her rather disparate collection of books and newspapers that her sometimes-butler Grell Sutcliff was introduced to the singular character of Wilde and, through him, to the still rather weak cultural undercurrent of aestheticism, and its more sinister cousin, decadence.

From Wilde, he made his way to Pater, the underpinning of the philosophies of the subversive movement that so spoke to his soul.  To live in the moment, with the sensations of everything judged only by their importance to him.  Art and artifice overwhelming and defeating the too long reigning Nature, throwing the defunct queen from her throne and lifting up the painted, the created, man’s work.  And he had thought humans boring, with their strict societal rules and hierarchies!  Granted, most of them were, but the ones who dared to step outside the bounds…oh, how beautiful they could be.  How interesting and original—not stale like the bureaucracy of the afterlife.  In the streets of London, in the sinister and defamiliarizing atmosphere of the gaslights, scarves of silk flowed like blood, and, when he went out on his midnight missions, the blood made a better dress than silk ever could.

It was the eagerly professed love of artifice which enflamed his sensibilities.  He shared that love, so deeply he shared it.  His present state of being was testament to that love.  To put on a mask and become, for a moment, a day, a lifetime, someone distinct from the unrecognized being underneath—that was his passion.  That was why he called himself an actress (although never within the hearing of someone of real society)—strictly defined gender roles were becoming so last decade.  The lines were already blurring in the literate circles, what with Michael Field being in actuality an incestuous lesbian couple, so who was to say that one Mr. Sutcliff couldn’t be a –tress?  And if his romantic interests sometimes strayed a bit into the realm of the homoerotic, what of it?  Stemming perhaps from an appreciation of strength, it inspired him to sometimes transgress into something not quite respectable.  Yet, always, his beautifully crafted artificial farce as the sometimes-butler was strong enough to repel anything he had to fear from human society (which was very little indeed).

Ah! The joy of artifice, the perfection of the artificial!  How perfectly he disguised his hair, the flame of it dulled to a mousy brown (a similar change enacted also on his outward temperament), the danger of his dagger-smile masked by a perpetual look of confusion and helplessness.  So like other women! Their true natures hid, their power lying dormant beneath their masks.  Artifice!  Servant to so many, to such varied purposes.

He reflected (during his sometimes-butler, sometimes-not hours), that death perhaps offered the most perfect and permanent expression of artifice.  Those wasteful, ungrateful harlots certainly looked more beautiful when they ceased their struggling, drenched in a living silk sheet.  Somehow, the peacefulness of death restored a false innocence to these prostitutes, an innocence they had not truly held in a long time.  ‘It is in this way,’ Grell would think to himself during the hours when he was his true self and thus was not, ‘that I am bettering the world, righting Nature’s several wrongs in one (or two) swift and graceful (and sometimes jagged) strokes.’  The woman and the otherwise empty, later abandoned, rooms became a canvas for his own contribution to the gently creeping aesthetic flavor of the times.

Here in London, away from the never-changing offices of the afterlife, Grell made it his goal not just to live in beauty, but also to live in the moment.  “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”  Flame-like was how he lived during his sometimes-not hours, freed from his perfect mask and often from his dear Madame.  His love for her was like the flame he yearned to be—it could at times consume the world, yet sometimes, it flickered, if she did not provide enough fuel.  He might be called fickle, but isn’t that they way with women?  Oh, their inconstant hearts!


End file.
